How We Use Email Marketing to Onboard, Convert, and Retain Customers
“Forget the naysayers, email marketing was ranked as the best channel in terms of return on investment, with 68% of companies rating the channel as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.” — Graham Charlton, Econsultancy
At Piktochart, emails are, without a doubt, one of our most preferred methods of communication with our users. When communicating about our latest updates or when we produce content that we hope people might find useful, emails can reach users’ inboxes directly.
In this regard, it is far more reliable than social media. Email marketing is really about talking to your customers and communicating interesting stories, valuable lessons, and relevant content to them.
Why email marketing?
The death of email has been debated for more than half a decade already. Hubspot claims that email marketing doesn’t work the same way anymore, but it can still reign supreme through “reflecting user behavior and the customer’s journey to your product or service”.
One thing that hasn’t changed throughout the years of digital marketing is that email marketing still empowers marketers to reach specific target audiences directly. Being able to tailor valuable content towards segments of your audience generate means you can generate highly effective outreach that stands out in the inbox and converts leads into customers.
The way Piktochart approaches email marketing can be broken down into three major components:
- Onboarding
- Conversion
- Retention
Onboarding New Users
Where should I start? What should I pick? How should I begin?
When users sign up to Piktochart, they enter the infographic world with tons of templates at their disposal. Picking a template on Piktochart might be easy, but picking the right one is a significantly taller order for most people. This is vital to your infographic’s success, but many wouldn’t know that.
This is where we start our effort to onboard users and guide them throughout their journey with email drips and in-app messages. We utilize Intercom as our main platform to do this because we can segment customers based on their activities.
The ultimate purpose here is to educate users as they explore the editor. This helps reduce the likelihood of someone churning due to usability confusion or lack of guidance. We set up a mix of emails and in-app messages for targeted users at various points in their user journey to tailor content and help for them. These stages include:
There’s a certain science behind how we interact with our users at each point of their journey. Our UX researchers, who spend time talking to customers, found that users typically want to just try out the app without distractions (read: no message popups). Then again, they don’t always know what to do and can end up churning or exiting.
Once we manage to pinpoint the specific moments where people subconsciously require help, we schedule the relevant criteria for when the in-app messages or emails should reach them. Help and content will be relevant and valuable, while at the same time being less spammy and more appreciated.
Converting non-users to free users, and free users to paid users
For conversions, we split our focus into two segments:
- Converting non-users to free users and
- Converting our current free users to paid users
Blog Newsletters
Piktochart’s blog subscribers receive regular newsletters sharing the most valuable content we’ve recently published. This subscription is open to all, and subscriptions happen by users clicking on the top right button in the header of any blogpost.
We use MailChimp here instead of Intercom because our unique blog subscriber list contains both existing users and non-users who are leads.
Our email newsletter revolves around providing valuable content and positioning ourselves as a thought leader in infographics and visual storytelling. This helps us build credibility as an expert in the field, which (hopefully) leads to more conversions.
Now, we don’t add all of our new users to this specific blog newsletter list. Piktochart’s blog subscribership is purely opt-in, so it also includes people that don’t currently have a Piktochart account. These are leads that can come to learn and love your product in the future. The focus of our newsletter is to encourage return visits from our readers in order to build and nurture emotional connections over time.
The PiktoTips Email Campaign
What does ‘PiktoTips’ mean? You guessed it: Piktochart Tips! PiktoTips are sent out to our user base and consist of more content about Piktochart and infographics.
Our PiktoTips campaign is slightly different than our regular blog newsletters, but it has the advantage of being sent to a defined target audience– our existing users. By tailoring and repurposing our existing blog content to this audience, we are able to help guide them along their Piktochart journey.
In the infographic above, Week 1 depicts the first week the user enters after the onboarding email drip has completed. They’ll start receiving a steady, valuable stream of content that slowly builds from basic tips and tricks to more in-depth content like marketing and startup tips, social sharing practices, and so on.
We think this helps convert free users to pro users because as long as they are engaged, these guides can assist them in becoming more and more successful with visual storytelling. Once again, that’s what inbound email marketing is all about — relevant, applicable content and improvement tips that make a user emotionally attached to their favorite tool.
Retention through Delight
Rewind 8 seconds, and you were probably reading the “…convert free users to pro users because as long at they’re engaged…” sentence. Our PiktoTips emails that offer content and build trust are also a method of encouraging loyalty and attachment!
Imagine receiving content that’s relevant and useful to you from your favorite brand because they care. Making users happy isn’t too hard if you act in sincerity, are good at listening to their problems, and reach them with content that helps.
The compulsory step before being able to delight your users is to listen to them. It would be the same for developers working on a new feature, or for the customer delight team looking to solve customer issues. Listening to your users’ actual problems enables you to identify which solutions can help them, which in turn delights them and increases your retention rate.
The compulsory step before being able to delight your users is to listen to them.
For email marketing at Piktochart, caring and listening to users is a daily effort. With up to a hundred thousand emails and in-app messages sent out daily, users can reply to them at any point in time.
Every day, our marketing team spends a fraction of their time combing through those replies and helping with things like product feedback, payment issues, or even partnership requests. As we receive replies, we can also direct them to our customer delight team or approach the dev team for a clear fix or clarification to the respective issue. Everyone in the team takes part in delighting customers!
Of course, communication with users should be a two-way street. While we listen to them (and encourage them to talk to us frequently), we also talk to them through emails:
This email gets sent to users who have logged in 150 times to create infographics, and it’s an acknowledgement of their milestone. It makes a difference when you care about your customers because it shows that you’re not all about making a profit. This email encourages and reminds them that the Piktochart team is always within reach, and it reinforces the relationship between our brand and our users.
Delight your customers by being a sincere listener, an effective problem solver, and an encouraging and supportive friend.
At Piktochart, we believe emails shouldn’t be used to sell. Take advantage of emails as the privileged medium of direct communication with your customers and connect, help, and delight them along their journey. They’ll appreciate it.
How do you approach your email marketing? Let us know if we helped, or if you have your own sound advice to offer our team instead!
For more tips on startup life, along with some advice on how visual storytelling can improve your skills as a designer, marketer, and educator, check out our blog at http://piktochart.com/blog.
This article was originally posted on the Piktochart Blog.
